Twitter Teaming Up With Stripe for E-Commerce Initiative

The short-messaging service is edging towards allowing users to purchase goods directly through the site, according to a person familiar with the company’s plans. The San Francisco company is near to reaching a deal with hometown payments processor Stripe to help facilitate the e-commerce initiative, this person said.

The move would be its first major initiative since bringing former Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard on board as its new head of commerce in August. Hubbard is still building his team.

Twitter’s promoted-ad products have become a draw for retailers, especially around “flash sales” events. But Twitter hasn’t introduced shopping features, and details of what the purchase experience might look like are unclear.

Allowing consumers to purchase items through Twitter would remove the step of redirecting consumers to the retailers’ site, making it more likely consumers will go through with the purchase. That could create an important new revenue source for Twitter, which today relies primarily on ad sales.

Still, Twitter faces challenges in rolling out an e-commerce initiative, including competing with juggernaut Amazon, as well as eBay and Groupon, which has seen some success with its Goods physical merchandise venture.

Social media site Facebook last summer backed off its own gifts service, which was designed to allow users to send cupcakes, teddy bears and other merchandise to one another. Its payments business, made mostly from virtual and digital goods users purchase from platform developers, accounted for about 11% of its total revenue in the third quarter of last year.

Facebook dipped its toe into e-commerce in August when it began testing a way to make it easier for its users to make purchases through the retailers’ mobile apps. But the test remains small in scope and in Facebook’s role in the purchase process. Under the test, a user visiting a retailer’s app will see the option to fill out payment fields with information already stored on Facebook.

A Twitter spokesman declined to comment.

Twitter’s potential deal with Stripe was first reported earlier by Recode.